


An imagined life

by vermicious_knid



Category: Beetlejuice (1988)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 05:21:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3107669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vermicious_knid/pseuds/vermicious_knid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beetlejuice AU! Where everyone's human and it's all about LOVEEEE</p>
            </blockquote>





	An imagined life

Back in Texas he’d just been released – _released, released, released!_ Swirling a penknife into the desk while the blue coats droned on so prettily.

“No more moonshine this side of the coast, young man.”

“Of course sir, yes sir.”

“And no more frauds, illegal driving, bootlegging of any kind, pimping, black market swindeling, impersonating doctors or men of the law…” He yawned. What now?

And they asked him where he was going to go, where he was going to work now, yadda yadda yadda and that handy map had been there, behind the caseworkers head. And _pop_ , decided just by looking at it like that, at the top of his head– his chair hitting the ground from it’s backward tilt with a decided thump.

Winter River, Conneticut. 

His caseworker meets him at the train station, or tries to, but she won’t find him until nightfall, sitting by the curb to her house, petting her german shepard, talking to it. Maybe that’s why, despite him being the largest scoundrel Juno’s ever met, she doesn’t report each and every little wicked thing he gets up to. (and there are so many _wicked_ things) She curses and screams at him, smokes two more packs for every visit he pays her. Yet he always leave her office with a Tupperware container of casserole or mince pie.

“Bye mom!” he hollers after her once after she’s thrown both her shoes at his retreating form.

She sets him up for work at the sewage company. He’s fired within the week. A blowup doll and jack daniels were the reasons, or simply put “misconduct”. Then he gets work on his own, and soon he stars appearing as a janitor, car mechanic and exterminator around the small town. How much work he actually accomplices is a mystery – he holds garage sales with seemingly stolen goods every other Sunday, stuff kids at the local college have left behind or forgotten. He gambles on the weekends and flirts with everyone’s wives. Those who spend more than five minutes with him can attest that something is “not quite right”. That’s why the women love him, they recognize the crazy in his brain straight away, like flies to honey, to rum and ruin. His stare is too intense and people have trouble looking him in the eye sometimes, that doing so will unravel something, could cause a hurricane or forest fires, nobody’s sure which.

One day at the city college, he’s doing some maintendence work among the lockers, mending old metal that’s too worn and out of shape, students passing by. He doesn’t know why at first, but he pauses in what he is doing to stare at this _girl_. She’s crouched down to the floor with a camera in the egg’s blue corridor, eyes intent on a spider on the linolium. She looks a bit like one herself. Her clothes are all black and baggy, shapeless, which makes her thin pale arms all the more twig like. He snorts at her and turns away. He doesn’t spend a moment’s thought about it really. Then the next Saturday, he’s in bed with this redhead, red underwear and red wine, red lightbulb in the ceiling. He’s drunk on gin she’s soft and curvy and It’s perfect really. He kisses her and gets a strange flash, this quick quick lightening picture in his head – of the spider girl. Annoying right? But he just tosses the image away.

Except, he keeps seeing her while he sleeps.

After that, he starts paying particular attention whenever he sees her. She must have done something strange to his head. He starts hearing many things told about her, all through hisses or stern whispers. Through dismissive comments told by some frat boys at the diner, whose cars will later all have slashed tires, smashed windows.

_She’s a goth kid, completely frigid._

_Don’t even try her man, waste of time._

_I heard she never talks to her family, spends the weekend sleeping at the cemetary._

_Jesus, there she is again – doesn’t the girl have enough black dye already? Get a hair cut, leave town._

_Watch out, the witch is walking over our graves!_

It’s funny how a name can change things so much, how it can reverberate inside you like a strange calling, how it can make you thirsty. Can make you crazier than you thought you were, if that is possible.

Her name is Lydia Deetz.

_Lydia, Lydia, Lydia._

When they see where his eyes are looking, lingering, they tell him he’s mad. Even his friends in this town protest, even if they are used to his whims and womanizing ways.

“Don’t even.” They say, gripping his arm and shaking their heads. Even Juno is giving him the look.. She’s a dark, pale figure who hangs out by herself at the park, the shopping mall, under the oak tree in front of the college building. Doesn’t he know that? She rarely talks to people, least of all men. Who carries a huge bag with her wherever she goes, paints her nails dark and hair wild and inky black. Then maybe it’s December suddenly, and he's is driving the exterminator van past the diner, looks inside, and slams the breaks. It’s funny.

It's funny because the only mad thing about her is that she might clearly be his undoing, she might really be.

“Hi.” He breathes out casually after shaking his blonde hair free from snow. His voice is like warm whiskey through the cold, rough but not unpleasant. Lydia is sitting at the counter, nursing a cup of hot chocolate, open black book with torn pages in front of her. She looks up at him, eyes brown and dark.

“Hello.” He sits down a few seats away, giddy.

“What are you writing? It’s not erotica is it, a dirty limerick? Know plenty of those.”

She scoffs at him, doesn’t say anything.

“So what is it?” he asks again after a minute. He marvels at his own impatience to hear her speak.

She opens her violet mouth, voice like the murmuring audience in front of the guillotine, soft and hushed. “Poetry.”

That first meeting didn’t go too well, and he ends up talking too much, accidentally complimenting her breasts. But to his defence, are quite lovely anyway. He finds so many excuses (some of them even plausible) to talk to her. She swears that he is the most annoying being on the planet, but she still slows down and keeps his pace while they walk. He scares little kids by hiding in the bushes with a chainsaw, goes to church just so he can stand up and recite prayers backwards. But somehow, Lydia adores that about him.

He’ll look at the floor and talk,talk, talk outside her dorm room late at night. Saying how cool he thinks she is, how he wants to be her friend. They could go fishing, he says. He suggests that she should come with her to work, he keeps dead and very interesting animals in the van that she might like, might photograph. and they could get coffee – a lot of coffee, does she know that his boss collects coupons, so he never has to pay for it? It’s great, would be greater too if she came along.

She is oddly charmed by his filthy apartment, and perhaps more so by all the books he keeps tucked under the bed, like a dirty secret. When she asks where he got them all he never tells.

They make out for the first time in her car an October night, Halloween two days away. A candle glows in each of his eyes, a demon on the rise, wanting to claim. She strokes his hair, bleached and electric. He whispers to her, enraptured, _you will be the death of me_ , and she echoes the words back to him. Sometimes Lydia just looks at him like she’s waiting for something. She will do that too when they have argued, as if maybe he’s not worth her time anymore. But he is, and he can prove it, will prove it every time. _(he isn’t, knows he isn’t but by this point he cannot fathom a life without her, bones, hands and everything.)_


End file.
